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[QUOTE=Admin;622]The immigration agency increased fees in July largely to raise about $1.5 billion to pay for modernizing computer equipment, hiring and training more workers, improving field offices and other spending.

Becoming a citizen now costs $595, up from $330. The price to get a green card is $1,010, up from $395. Applicants for both pay another $80 each for digital fingerprinting, a $10 increase.

Congress gave the immigration agency $100 million a year over five years through 2006 to reduce the immigration backlogs. Agency Director Emilio Gonzalez announced in September 2006 the backlog had fallen to about 139,0000 cases. About 1 million applications in the backlog that were incomplete, from people still awaiting visas or whose FBI name check was delayed, were not counted.

The administration deserves credit for securing the $500 million from Congress for the backlog, said Doris Meissner, former Immigration and Naturalization Service Commissioner under President Clinton.

"They broke through the idea that this should just be purely financed by the applicant fees themselves," said Meissner, a senior fellow with Migration Policy Institute, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank. "But it was finite."

Since 1988, the work of Citizenship and Immigration Services and its predecessor, the Immigration and Naturalization Service, has been largely paid for by revenue from application fees. Congress has provided money for specific projects over the years, but generally those have been limited to a few years. Sometimes fee money has been diverted for things like detention centers.

The result has been an agency constantly shifting resources to respond to the latest crisis, critics say.

"Every time the system breaks down, they are incentivizing people to say, 'Screw the system, I'll just overstay my visa.'" said James Jay Carifano, a research fellow with the conservative Heritage Foundation think tank.

Immigration officials say they will be able to chip away at the backlogs as 1,500 new workers are hired and trained. Things should be back where they were before the application spike by 2010, the agency's spokeswoman Chris Rhatigan said.

Williams thinks that's an optimistic prediction. The 7.7 million applications the agency received last year amount to about three years of work, she said.[/QUOTE]

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